Posts Tagged ‘fiber’

My early translucents are still coming on, and now the really beautiful firm perfect fruits are here. It looks like I will be able to make some dried apples after all.

If you want to do the peeling coring and slicing efficiently I recommend the Apple Master. Just poke the spikes into the rear of the apple, turn the crank and it automatically peels, cores and slices it. If you do not have an Apple Master, you can do it manually but it takes longer. I dry them in a food dehydrator, so technically they qualify as “raw” because the dehydrator does not get hot enough to qualify as a cooker. You can also do it in the sun if you have a sunny place that will not be disturbed, or in your oven heated to its lowest setting. If you do it outdoors, cover apples with a screen so that nature doesn’t come along and mess it up.

Re: the formatting, I will redo it when I get WP 2.6 installed. They say you can do real captions in WP 2.6 So please bear with, because I am having a hard time to get the blurbs to go with the pictures.

The applemaster!

A bowl of water with a couple of vitamin C, or a little vinegar. You plunge the sliced apples into this solution before setting them on the dehydrator tray. It gives them a little more flavor and helps prevent over brown (although your finished dried apples will be a nice tan color.)

When using an AppleMaster, apples you use must be firm and they must be straight from butt to core. If they are mushy the AppleMaster will just squish them. If they are not straight, you will get bits of the core where you don’t want it. If the apple is otherwise OK, you can just do the asymmetrical ones by hand.

Voila! All peeled, cored and sliced! I toss the beautiful green peel in the blender along with the not so beautiful apples for my sustainable applesauce, since that’s where all the quercetin and fiber is.

This cuts in a spiral, so you need to run a knife through it to get slices.

In a dehydrator, the drying process takes about 3 hours. You will want to monitor them, as the ones on the bottom will dry first, so you will probably wish to rotate your trays. Don’t do what I do and overdry them to crispy flakes. They are dry enough as long as they feel dry to the touch, they can still be soft and flexible. Voila! Dried apples.

The ancient Greeks were afraid to eat beans because they were supposed to contain dead people’s souls or something. I wonder why they thought that. And then there are Mexican “jumping” beans. I have seen them. They really do jump and wiggle because they are infested with the larva of an insect inside the seed. The bean picture below is not an animation. Steal it, put it in your animation ripper, and you will see that it’s just one static frame. I use this picture to illustrate that beans are crawling with fiber, minerals and good healthy protein.
If you cook black beans with epazote, (chenopodium ambrosioides,) in English known as skunkweed or wormseed, and often considered a true weed, it cuts down on the fartiferous effects. Here is a great educational PDF if you are interested in epazote. The epazote adds a taste that takes getting used to, but once you are used to it black beans don’t taste right without it. Epazote grows wild in the southern states of the USA and in Mexico. You can often buy it at farmers’ markets, or you can grow it quite easily in your own herb garden. Once you are familiar with it you can pick it wild. However I caution against eating anything that grows roadside because you don’t know what pesticides it may have absorbed.Amazon.com Widgets